Xen on amd64
Recently we at BHOST.RU were deploying VPS and DDS hosting and I conducted some Xen tests on our amd64 boxes. General impression is: it works fine and stable enough for production use.
Xen is a so-called virtual machine monitor. It's able to run VMs in both paravirtualization (when guest OS core modified to communicate with host OS) and hardware virtualization (guest OS runs unmodified and virtualization handled by a virtualization-compatible CPU) modes. Xen is open-source, but there are also commercial VMMs in the market - Microsoft Virtual Server and VMWare Server.
We run Xen on quad core Inte Core2 servers under a CentOS 5 Linux (it's actually free RHEL build, but it's an open secret). Also we have an Intel Xeon 5120 server for our internal needs, it works just the same.
Good news in first place. Xen works fast, really fast. Of course there is some virtualization overhead, but it's tiny, a few percents. All Linux distros I've tried (half a dozen) worked well in both PV and hypervisor modes (HVM). Windows Server 2003 i386 (HVM, of course) - good. It hangs in setup, but hitting F5 and selecting "Standard PC" worked for me. The only problem is that it can utilize only one core. Windows Server 2008 (I had only i386 CD too) installs fine, detects all cores but can't detect network adapter.
And some sad things. I've read many words about running NetBSD and OpenSolaris on Xen. But it looks like nobody have built NetBSD 3 or NetBSD 4 core with amd64 PV support. I tried running NetBSD 3 in HVM mode (4 version hasn't been released yet) but it wrote (on console) that it can't detect console. OpenSolaris should run, they even have detailed instructions for both i386 and amd64. But it just failed to run.
I also wanted to test FreeBSD, but it looks like Kip Macy is the only Xen developer under FreeBSD. And he contributes a lot of another work to the FreeBSD, so his eventually FreeBSD kernel builds for PV is outdated (and i386 only).
P.S. Also I got a pretty WTF picture from the CentOS setup:
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